


Under the Black

by ImJaebabie



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pirate, Fluff and Humor, M/M, One Shot, Short One Shot, implied stuff, one time Lucas looked very pirate-y and then I wrote this really fast with no actual clear direction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-13 02:05:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15353823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImJaebabie/pseuds/ImJaebabie
Summary: Jungwoo prefers to practice medicine voluntarily, rather than under duress, but maybe he can be more on board with things when a certain pirate is slightly more undressed.





	Under the Black

**Author's Note:**

> i hate myself for that summary. here's a stupid one-shot luwoo that changes styles in the middle and no one asked for. this is totally un-beta'd.

Jungwoo wakes with a start, little stuttering puffs making it difficult for him to calm down and catch his breath. He dreams of it sometimes, in almost exact detail: the night the pirate ship arrived, when the crew swarmed into the small port and took, burned, or destroyed everything. He remembers in striking clarity the image of his little office in flames, curtains billowing out the windows before catching the inferno and burning away in just seconds, the door hanging off its hinges, and a small fortune’s worth of medicine and equipment simply lost. Then his dream self turns around, just as he had, and sees the man all in black standing in the middle of the cobblestone street, gripping a sword loosely in one hand and a pistol firmly in the other, a mask covering most of his face. 

“You can come with me, now, or you can stay here and die with the rest,” he states simply, bluntly, without any clear hint of emotion. 

Jungwoo shivers every time, looking into those coal-black eyes framed by fire and screams. He follows the man, he boards a terrible ship, and he doesn’t look back. 

But that is his dream, and although it’s also a memory it’s not the reality of now. Now he’s looking at a young face, scarred on the surface in small ways and on the inside in big ones, unknown to most of the world except from behind a mask, because if they knew more of his face than the ferocity in his eyes they would not fear him like they do. To Jungwoo, it’s hard to think of him that way anymore. Though not still a boy his face still holds onto the soft childish curves, in his cheeks and mouth, his chin strong yet still smooth. When his eyes are closed his eyelashes fan out like the long fronds of a fern, and when open and relaxed they’re round and wide, what once seemed impenetrable black proving to be a warm and at times hesitating brown. So he lines them with blackest, heavy kohl and furrows in his strong eyebrows until, fueled by his own fear and anger and anxiety, those eyes start fires and burn villages and take what will quell his fear. Jungwoo knows this, yet looking at this face asleep he cannot fear it. 

He hasn’t been asleep more than a few hours but he stirs now. 

“You’re watching me again.”

The voice is deep and raspy with sleep, but the tousled softness that clings to him as he wakes ruins the edge of danger. 

Jungwoo leans into the side of the chair. 

“There’s surprisingly little else of interest to do in here.”

He sits up, swinging long legs over the side of the bunk and rolling a shoulder to stretch it, the joint cracking in a way that makes Jungwoo wince. Too much sword fighting creating tension in that spot. 

“Then figure out what’s ailing the captain,” he grumbles. 

Jungwoo smiles. “With what medicine? What tools? The books here are fifty years old at best.”

“You’re a Doctor, aren’t you supposed to know a disease when you see it?” 

“His ailment is internal, and I’m not a magician,” Jungwoo argues, “I can’t see through his body to the inside...Yukhei.”

A frustrated groan escapes him, hands pressing into his eyes. He doesn’t like Jungwoo calling his given name, but once Jungwoo learned it he wouldn’t stop. 

“What, then.” 

Carefully, Jungwoo slides out of the chair that’s like his prison cell and crosses the rough wooden planks to the bunk. With delicate caution he seats himself beside the worn down first mate and reaches a hand to the tense shoulder. 

“Get me the things I need to do my work. And in the meantime,” Jungwoo massages the formidable knots under his fingertips, “let me heal you first.”

Yukhei tenses first, then his shoulders droop and his hands fall into his lap. He stares at the floor while Jungwoo works his shoulder, kneading through the soft black cotton of his shirt and slowly encouraging the muscles to loosen. 

“Just because you didn’t give me any choice in being here, doesn’t mean you can’t trust me a little now,” Jungwoo informs him quietly as his hands move. 

“I gave you a choice,” Yukhei replies. 

“Not a good one. Whoops, sorry,” in response to the hiss from Yukhei at a certain pressure point, Jungwoo apologizes, smiling sheepishly behind him. He shifts, pulling his legs up onto the bunk and kneeling behind the pirate, getting a better angle to press and squeeze all the points where the tension is strongest. Yukhei is young but he’s seen enough stress in his life for six people, and he keeps it all bundled inside broad shoulders like a spring waiting to snap. 

Jungwoo reaches up to his neck, his pointer fingers extending up towards Yukhei‘s ears and his thumbs positioning just above the shoulder blade, framing the vertebrae. His long fingers bend forward, pulsing a rhythmic pressure that touches down to the collarbone. 

“If you keep holding all this tension right here,” Jungwoo teases, though he’s serious, ”you’ll die before you’re forty.”

“I’m gonna die before then anyway,” comes the retort, and Jungwoo thinks his voice sounds oddly strained for how much more relaxed Yukhei seems. 

“That’s optimistic.”

“Either my job will kill me, I’ll kill myself, or you will.”

“Again, I think I’ve proven myself pretty trustworthy at this point, if you don’t think so after I lied for you all to that naval officer the other week well-“

Yukhei sighs loudly, turning his shoulders from under Jungwoo’s grip and looking him dead in the eye. “That isn’t what I mean.”

Gone is the soft, hesitating brown, and once again the darkest black fills his irises. Jungwoo fights the urge to shudder, but loses the battle as Yukhei takes hold of his knee in one calloused, suntanned hand. 

“How do you mean?”

“I mean,” he says, and his voice is raspy though the sleep is gone from it completely, leaving only the low suggestion of a threat, ”that if I keep waking up to find you watching me sleep with that far away look on your face, and if you continue to giggle at me every time I’m trying to get you to take a real danger seriously, and if you don’t stop randomly touching me and being concerned about me when I’ve been nothing but sharp and threatening since I first forced you to be here…”

With each word Yukhei pulls himself back onto the bunk, first one leg then the other, turning more fully to face Jungwoo and forcing him backward into the pillow. Then he’s hovering above the young doctor, the skin at his neck reddened from Jungwoo’s touch and something else, knees grounding him into the light mattress on either side of Jungwoo’s hips while his hands cage in by his ears. 

“...if you keep doing all that, knowing what it does to me, it could kill me too.”

Jungwoo’s heart is beating out a nice tune, dancing along with no care for him keeping up, and he can’t help laughing awkwardly a bit. 

“Oh, so you noticed, then.”

Yukhei looks just the pleasurable side of angry. “Attempts to escape by means of flirting won’t be tolerated,” he warns, leaning in. 

“By god, how many times do I have to say I’m not trying before you bel--“

His sentence ends in Yukhei’s mouth, the pirate’s full lips enveloping his more delicately bowed ones almost completely. There’s very little wind in the early morning to rock the ship with waves but Jungwoo still feels like he’s floating, and he’s just as dizzy as the night Yukhei fed him rum till he couldn’t walk. But the feeling this time is so much better, much preferred to know the lines of Yukhei’s hip bones sinking down to his own, to catalogue the places each of his ten fingers touch, to lick at the enamel of his teeth, or bite the lobes of his ears and count the piercings there. 

Sifting fingers through Yukhei’s thick, sun-bleached hair, Jungwoo tilts his head from where those lips have been mouthing at the skin just below his collarbone and aligns them with his own again, sinks into the depths of the kiss until he has to break away again and scramble for air. 

Yukhei chuckles. “I already feel better. You’re more skilled than I thought.” 

“Oh,” Jungwoo grins as he catches his breath, “my skills go far beyond this. I know the human body _very_ well.” 

Jungwoo feels captured in every sense of the word as a smiling Yukhei connects to him again, sea-life toned muscles stretching under Jungwoo’s fingertips as they move over the course of his back and shoulder blades. He can still feel the knots and tension though, despite the distraction. 

“I really do need to do some consistent work on your back, though,” he advises in a moment his lips are free. 

“Would it help if I took my shirt off?” Yukhei replies cheekily. 

“I’m actually not joking?” 

“Neither am I.” 

The cabin feels like it’s a million degrees, as if they’re passing through a sea of fire, and Jungwoo has swallowed some of it. He swallows for real, dryly, just for good measure. “Ah, well, remove it then and I’ll just do an evaluation…” 

Disrobed Yukhei is sight, and an even better one when in much closer proximity; namely, hovering above Jungwoo and firm at his touch. He traces the outlines of Yukhei’s tattoos: a snarling panda face on the upper right of his chest, and the rabbit that stands on his left hip and reaches up his side, nose toward his back. Not typical pirate tattoos, but Jungwoo imagines they have meaning, and likes the way Yukhei practically purrs at him while his fingers move. 

“What’s the evaluation, doctor?” 

Jungwoo shivers. “Initial inspection is positive but...” he slides a hand over the pirate’s hip, “I’ll probably need to get a closer look. Might be invasive.” 

“Maybe I need... _physical_ therapy.” 

“...I feel like you’re not taking my profession seriously anymore. Unfair that there’s fewer innuendo opportunities with your chosen line of wo--”

“I’m looking to sheath my sword, know anywhere I might find a good, tight fit for it?” 

A hot blush erupts over Jungwoo, clearly visible under his fair skin. “Point made.” 

Yukhei’s grin thins, his expression returning to the far more smouldering look it had earlier. “Well?” he asks, “do you?” 

Jungwoo manages a squeak of a yes before he’s covered by Yukhei, almost fully hidden below the longer, larger body. Then it’s two new sides of the man that he knows: in addition to the fearsome pirate and the harried first-mate, there’s also a man of heated passion, and an overgrown kid filled with childish humor. Maybe he didn’t love being not-so-voluntarily forced into this new life at sea, but learning that the pirate in black is not the person the stories imply has Jungwoo thinking perhaps a change in scenery isn’t so bad for him. He can be a doctor anywhere, heal and cure wherever people are broken or hurt. If that means pirates? They’re still people, lead by at least one whose heart seems good. 

Yukhei shifts them, and Jungwoo lets out a gasp. 

He thinks, if he engages in a few activities outside the usual realm of doctoring, perhaps that’s alright too.

**Author's Note:**

> that's it!!  
> comment with your best doctor or pirate puns/innuendos I wanna laugh and feel uncomfortable, alright bye.


End file.
